Riding the Routes of the
Internet Do You Know Where Your Information Goes? By Sway Grantham The time is 8am and by this time in the morning I have relied on the Internet to complete 5 different tasks as part of my morning routine. Rising to the sound of my alarm, I check social media and news sites for an update into the happenings over night. Happy that the world is still turning, I now progress to my emails and begin compiling a mental todo list. Having filtered through the spam, I check the weather for the day to inform appropriate attire and begin getting ready to go to work. Potentially before I’m out of bed, I have trusted the Internet to accurately convey current events and recent developments from around the world and closer to home. I have trusted the Internet to reassure me that family and friends are doing ok through my maintained connection with social media. I have trusted the Internet to confirm important developments within my professional network via a different form of social media. I have even trusted the Internet to help me make an informed decision about the clothes I should wear. So I must know all about how the Internet gets this information, right?
According to the office of National Statistics, 36 million (73%) adults within UK used the Internet daily in 2013. A statistic which increases to 85% focusing on the 16-34 years age bracket. More people than ever before are trusting the Internet to provide their news updates via online newspapers or magazines (55%), to access their bank accounts (50%), to seek health information (43%) or to buy groceries (21%). So they must know all about how the Internet gets this information, right? The majority of adults have no idea how the Internet works, where information goes, how it is stored or how it is returned to their device. Based on a 152 responses from a recent survey which I sent out on several social media websites: adults from 16 to 65+ rated their own understanding of the Internet as an average of 3.60 out of 5. Now I guess this doesn’t seem too bad, they can nearly all explain that the Internet uses a phone line, as many remember the troublesome dial-up days of having to decide whether Internet browsing or your phone calls were more important! Following the departure of that signal down the phoneline – what does happen? Only 21.6% of those who didn’t need to understand the Internet for work, believed they could explain the journey of a website request from beginning to end. Now I wonder, does it really matter if the average adult understands as long as there are some Computer Scientists who do? In the simplest terms what happens is: your request to view a webpage travels along the phone line (along with 1000s ◄ Are you completely reliant on the Internet? What if it disappeared tomorrow?